Major changes occurring in the world are redefining the metrics of excellence for higher education.

The Commission for the Future of Higher Education has just released a draft report, which was apparently prepared by staff, not the Commission members. Thus we can expect that the Commission will wade in and carry our a significant rewriting. So, rather than respond to the draft (other than to say that I find some of the things in it to be right on target, and others to be just silly), I will describe a few things I would like to see in the final report.

First, a discussion of the changes they see in the world, and why those changes put our higher education system at risk. There are surely many things wrong with our system of higher education (and those of all of our competitors, for that matter), and we are unlikely to have the enthusiasm or resources to fix them all. What threats do they believe their solutions are protecting us against? At present, we cannot judge the utility of their solutions, since we do not know the problems for which they are solutions

Second, what should we be teaching students in today’s world? If we want to do outcomes testing of learning, we had better be real sure we are testing for the desired outcomes, because the test will become the driver. Reports show that offshoring is creeping up the educational-attainment ladder. The key issue seems to me to be, what do today’s students need to learn so that they have a good chance of being successful in the increasingly globalized competition for jobs?

The report notes that the era of robust growth in international student enrollments ended three years age, and that “there are now fewer international students enrolled in U.S. higher education institutions than there were in the fall of 2001." In addition, senior international scholars are encountering continuing difficulties in coming to the United States, and there is a growing negativity on their part towards this county. As the report emphasizes, this “intellectual anti-global” stand on the part of the United States has a number of extremely negative implications for our future competitiveness and well-being.

Research is, of course, what defines the reputation of most university faculty. In turn, the reputation of the faculty builds the reputation of the university. Thus the connecting input characteristics of the research module must be defined in a way that it supports the efforts of the faculty in this domain. In addition, there are very close ties between research and Ph.D. education, and so one of the outputs that one would have to maintain for a research module is that it be appropriate for graduate training and, increasingly, undergraduate research experiences. However, in many if not most of our major research universities, there are research centers- often quite large - whose primary mission is not training, but production of focused sponsored research for, typically, government, sometimes industry. Indeed, at one limit, many such centers do classified research, which is inappropriate for the training of students. Much of the research in these centers generally is not carried out by regular faculty, but by a staff of professional researchers. Thus, even in some cases when the research itself may be quite appropriate for graduate training, lack of involved faculty mentors may give these centers marginal value for graduate training. The rational for having such centers will vary from university to university, but for those centers most removed from the academic center, the rational is often tied up in the larger service role of the university. Such centers can contribute significantly to the reputation of the university, thus bringing value in a different dimension.

Thus we see within a typical large university at least two different types of research module. One of these is closely aligned with aspirations of regular faculty and with graduate training, and therefore has rather well defined input and output characteristics that allow it to work synergistically with other modules (e.g. education) in the university. The other is more divorced from the educational component of the university, and tied in perhaps with the service component. Its output requirements are primarily that it satisfy its funding sources, input requirement that it do so in a way that enhances the reputation of the university e.g. through service, or perceived excellence. Of course, the reality is that there is a continuum of possibilities that lies between these two types of modules. However, these two extreme cases will let us investigate how the opportunities of globalization might lead to improvements in both.

“Modularity” is an ill-defined concept as used in discussing globalization of the modern corporation, in that it may mean very different things to different organizations at different times. Generally, however, it has to do with breaking a process into separable blocks (modules) that have sufficiently well defined inputs and outputs that the blocks can later be fit together and recombined into a complete process. “Globalization” then has to do with accessing resources world-wide to produce those modules in the most effective and efficient manner. As shown by Berger’s research (see The many pathways to globalization, April 21, 2006), there does not seem to be any “right” way to define and produce the various modules of a process. Rather, the way in which a process is modularized by a particular company is likely to be highly dependent on the history and conditions of that company - its legacy.

Thus, examining modularity in higher education is unlikely to lead to a generic model modularization. However, the impossibility of achieving a single unique answer should not dissuade us from exploring some of the possibilities for modularity, and the role of globalization for those possibilities.

Samuel Palmisano, Chair of the Board and CEO of IBM, provides an interesting and concise perspective of what globalization means in the corporate world in an article, The Globally Integrated Enterprise, that appeared in the May/June 2006 edition of Foreign Affairs. In this article, he outlined the evolution of corporations into global entities, and contrasted the newer, globally integrated corporation with earlier international and multinational corporations. It is interesting to use his framework to look at internationalization activities in university higher education.

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